The People's Chorus
A 60 minute documentary for BBC4 - 2006

British Tudor composer Thomas Tallis’s masterpiece is a sublime meditation for 40 parts called ‘Hope in the Other’, a 10 minute wall of sound of breathtaking beauty. It’s very seldom performed (though it’s the most requested choral music on Classic fm), because it’s written for eight choirs of five parts – a combination of forces rarely gathered.

The People’s Chorus is an hour-long documentary, the culmination of which is a performance in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall of Spem in Alium, rehearsals and performance overseen by chorus master David Lawrence. The call went out for the public to take part in a massive choral undertaking – a thousand voices to form the eight choirs, 125 per choir, 25 voices per part.

The programme reveals the technique and complexity of Tallis’s extraordinary work, as it discovers what happens when all the voices come together for their only rehearsal. It inevitably began as total chaos – there are after all forty different lines of music; the question is whether they can be blended together in a short time to work as a single massive unit. There are big issues – it’s very hard for that many voices to sing in time with each other as the sound takes time to travel, for a start – and a lot at stake; the drama will be in the real-time rush to get it right. There are also cameo stories to follow as people who have never sung in public before find themselves in a large and intimidating performance venue. We follow the build-up to the final performance backstage, and then experience the full ten minutes of one of the most marvellous, impossible and sublime pieces of music in the world, a piece hardly ever performed in public, sung by a magnificent 1,000 voices.